


to be unbroken or be brave again

by iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Established Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, FLUFFY ESCAPISM GET YA FLUFFY ESCAPISM HEEYA, Fluff, M/M, That's It That's Literally The Entire Fic, The Losers Go To Pride, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24594712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid/pseuds/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid
Summary: In the past twenty-one months, Richie has (1) killed an otherworldly monster from the depths of his worst nightmares, (2) reunited with the only real friends he's ever had, (3) started dating the first guy he was ever in love with, and (4) come out, publicly, terrifyingly, on stage. And you know what? He's long overdue for a celebration.Or, The Gang Goes To Pride. 🏳️🌈
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 33
Kudos: 186





	to be unbroken or be brave again

🖤🤎💗🧡💛💚💙💜

The train car rolls its rickety way across Jersey at fuck-all miles an hour, throwing rows of gunmetal gray buildings and industrial parks behind them and opening up more of the same in front. The surface of some river or another shimmers an iridescent biohazard green under the sun outside Richie’s window, and a crane coasts along, flying a few inches above the water’s surface — or, shit, is it a crane or a heron? A stork, maybe?

Richie’s already got his phone out, so he lifts it up. Snaps a blurry picture. Sends it off to Stan with a single question mark as its caption. Remembers his phone is on airplane mode and that it won’t send until they get off the train. Sighs. Returns to his watch of the beautiful landscape of northern New Jersey, waiting for—

Ah-ha!

There it is, the New York skyline, rising up over a horizon of polluted waterways and grassy marshes. The gaggle of teenagers that have been excitedly chatting three seats over since well before Newark, they notice right around when he does, and one of them — a short, stout kid that kind of reminds him of a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Ben, complete with the blonde hair and peach fuzz goatee — scrambles across the aisle into the empty window seat to get a look.

Richie smiles, sitting back against his seat, and he starts whistling.

_Start spreading the news…_

“Stop it.”

His smile widens until it strains his cheeks, and he asks, “Stop what?” before he picks the whistling right back up.

_I’m leaving today…_

Eddie opens one eye, as if he really intended on getting some shut-eye on their twenty-seven minute train ride from Newark to Penn Station, and levels Richie with a one-narrowed-eye capital-L Look. “If I hear one single note of that fucking song, I cannot be held responsible for my actions. You know this.”

“Ah, c’mon,” Richie says, dropping his voice so it’s clear it’s only meant for the two of them, huddled together in their Amtrak seat. “Can’t fault a guy for a little enthusiasm, I mean, it’s the Big Apple.”

“I sure the fuck can,” Eddie calmly fires back, “and it sure the fuck isn’t.”

“It’s _not_ the Big Apple? You’re saying the TV fuckin’ _lied_ to me?”

“No one fucking _calls_ it that, and you’ve _been_ there before, you should know—”

“Oh, what,” Richie says, shimmying around in his seat until he’s angled toward Eddie, their knees knocking, and Eddie sighs and rolls his eyes and automatically moves to throw his own legs over Richie’s lap. Which, _fuck,_ even now, even after a year, that still sends a little shock of warmth up from Richie’s stomach. But he shakes it off. Clears his throat. “So I can’t be excited to visit the city that never sleeps? The city so nice they named it twice? The city of dreams, the city of sin—?”

“That one’s Vegas, dipshit.”

“— and you’re telling me,” Richie continues undeterred by the pet name, “that you’re not super fucking stoked to roam your old stomping grounds? You’re not jazzed to show me all that pent up New Yorker energy you’ve been keeping stowed away since you came out west?” He drops his head sideways onto the seat, hunching over so he can peer up at Eddie through his lashes. “I don’t know jack about the big city, Eds. You gonna show me how it’s done?”

Eddie looks down at him, sucking his bottom lip between his teeth, which is as surefire a sign as any that he’s trying not to break. Then he _does_ break, a slow smile bringing those dimples back into his cheeks where they belong, deep divots accentuated all the more by the scruff he’s let grow out these last few months. He leans up a bit to kiss Richie’s forehead, all soft lips and the scrape of facial hair and a big old ball of warmth pushing up at the inside of Richie’s ribcage.

“Yeah, you’ve been spoiled in California, Rich,” he murmurs as he sits back. “You couldn’t navigate a crowd if your life depended on it.”

“I dunno, I’m big,” Richie shrugs, plucking at the soft rainbow trim of Eddie’s running shorts. “I could part a crowd pretty easy, I think.”

“It’s not about size, it’s about stealth.”

“Oh, it’s about _stealth,_ huh?”

“Yes, stealth, asshole,” Eddie fires back, swatting at Richie’s arm when he straightens up and tries to poke one of Eddie’s dimples. “It’s about your _attitude._ You’re too nice.”

Now Richie’s honest-to-God laughing. “I’m _what?”_

“You heard me, you’re too fucking nice. You’d never get through the crowd because you’d be too busy, like, not wanting to ask anyone to move, or trying not to knock anyone over with your giant fucking Superman shoulders—”

“My _what—”_

“— or you’ll be making friends with everyone in your immediate vicinity and I’ll be forced to literally drag you through the crowd to get you moving,” Eddie continues, shooting him a look that’s not so much cutting as it is knowing, a look that says _I’m right, and you know I’m right, and it’s because I know you too well._ Once upon a time a look like that would have scared the piss out of Richie, would have sent him running for the hills, but coming from Eddie it’s… familiar, and warm, and undercut with so much fondness that Richie can’t find it in himself to be afraid of it. Eddie adds with a shrug, “Tell me I’m wrong. I’m gonna get trapped like a little kid when their mom runs into someone she knows at the grocery store while you make small talk with the entire population of the tri-state area.”

Richie snorts another laugh, just as the train windows are blotted out black and the train dips underground. The kid who looks somewhat like a baby Ben and who’s been pressing his cheek to the window three seats up finally sags down, shuffling back to his friends on the other side of the aisle.

Some of the rest of his friends, it seems, are in a very passionate discussion that Richie can’t help overhearing.

“It’s like, a Japanese folk tale,” one girl is saying, a downright tiny girl who’s sitting with her feet tucked under her, pulling idly at a pair of rainbow suspenders clipped to her shorts. “About a crane that pretends to be a human.”

“A woman,” Baby Ben adds.

“Yeah, a woman,” says their other friend, who Richie can’t see beyond a truly massive amount of red curly hair over the back of a train seat. “That’s important. It’s the crane _wife._ She pretends to be a human woman.”

“Yeah, yeah, exactly,” says Rainbow Suspenders.

The kid they’re explaining this to, whose gender Richie couldn’t even begin to guess and who’s wearing a shirt with a rainbow bowl of chips and salsa that says PICO DE GAYO — which, holy shit, Richie needs to own that shirt fucking yesterday — cocks their head to the side and furrows their brow. “Okay, but like, why?”

Richie looks back down at his and Eddie’s linked hands, trying not to be a creep as Rainbow Suspenders explains, “Because she’s in _love,”_ at the same time that Curly Red Hair says, “Because she wants to be _accepted,”_ and then they both start course correcting at once so it’s impossible to parse what they’re saying over each other.

“The _point_ is,” Baby Ben gently cuts in, “she knows her husband won’t love her anymore if he finds out she’s a crane, so she spends every night plucking out her feathers _one by one_ so she can pretend to be a woman.”

“Yeah,” Rainbow Suspenders agrees, nodding and gesturing at Baby Ben. “Exactly, it’s like, at the end of every night she’s _exhausted,_ right? But she’s happy, ‘cause like, she can keep pretending to be a woman and her husband is gonna keep loving her.”

“And _that’s_ what it’s like,” Curly Red Hair says with an air of finality.

Richie frowns, not one hundred percent sure but at least a _little_ sure they’ve lost him, and he glances up—

— to find that one of the kids is looking _directly_ at him.

She’s not one of the kids that had been in the conversation about cranes plucking their feathers out, but she’s clearly with them, standing with her elbows on the tops of two adjacent seats to make room for some of her other friends to sit. As soon as Richie makes eye contact, though, she goes bug-eyed and drops down into her seat, ducking out of view.

Richie waits. There’s seven of them, all gathered together in one spot even though there’s only four seats, and although they’ve been talking over one another with hardly a thought for their volume this entire time, now they’re suddenly whispering. Richie definitely hears one of them harshly shushing the other.

Inevitably, after about twenty seconds, the same girl slowly inches up until she’s peeking over the seat at him again. She’s got a bright blue undercut and some seriously loud eye makeup on, framing a pair of wide grayish eyes.

Richie flashes a toothy smile, and that, apparently, is enough to give her the confidence to blurt out:

“Are you Richie Tozier?”

One of her friends, Curly Red Hair by the sound of it, immediately shushes her again. Blue Undercut Girl stays right where she is, though, peering at Richie with only the top half of her head visible.

“That’s what they tell me,” Richie answers.

She lifts up a bit so he can see her whole face. The eye makeup looks like it’s been purposefully done messy, a brush stroke of deep purple eyeshadow across each eye. There’s also a neat rectangle flag — or Richie thinks it’s a flag, anyway, pink and then purple and then blue — painted high on each of her cheekbones.

“Cool,” she says. “Are you going to Pride?”

And it’s funny — er, well, not funny, really. It’s the kind of funny that his therapist would give him _that look_ for if he called it funny, but whatever, fuck it, it’s _funny_ how even now, even after everything, even after his show, even on his way to a place that’s gonna be chock full of other people that are… like him, people that don’t _care,_ even on his way to an event that says right in the damn name to be proud of it, Richie still hesitates on his answer. He still feels a cold shock of fear through his veins, just like he always has.

It is a little dampened these days, though, maybe. Less arctic tsunami, more ice bucket challenge.

Still. He makes a joke of it. It’s reflex.

“Nope,” Richie says, popping the p, and he plucks at his shirt, a pastel pink button up with different color dinosaurs all over it, unbuttoned over a pale yellow tee. _Technically_ most of the colors of the rainbow, as he’d pointed out to Eddie that morning, so it counts. “I just always dress like I stumbled drunk out of the kid’s section at K-Mart.”

Eddie, slouched back against his seat with his arms crossed, nods. “He does, yeah.”

The girl’s wide eyes shift from Richie to Eddie and back again. Her brows pinch in the middle, like she has no fucking clue what to make of the two of them, and Eddie’s the one that comes to her rescue first.

“He’s screwing with you,” Eddie tells her.

Her eyes narrow. One eyebrow goes up. Another one of her friends is peeking over the back of her seat now, too. Baby Ben is shamelessly staring.

“So you… _are_ going to Pride?”

Outside of the kids’ view, Eddie gently pries Richie’s hand off his thigh and laces their fingers together, gives him a little squeeze. 

Richie squeezes back and flashes another toothy smile.

“I sure the hell am.”

The girl smiles back. “Cool.”

“Yeah. Very cool,” Richie agrees. “I like the, uh—” he gestures vaguely at his own face with his free hand, then points at each cheekbone— “the flags, by the way.”

“Yeah?”

“Fuck yeah.”

“You want one?” she asks, then glances back at her friends, most of which have now half-stood or kneeled in their seats so they can see him. “We have all the colors. We can do a rainbow.”

Richie opens his mouth, shuts it, then opens it again. An announcement dings overhead, letting them know how soon they’ll be pulling in to Penn Station, and he shrugs. Fuck it, right? When in Rome, or something.

“Hope you’re a fast artist, kid. You got three minutes.”

In the end, Blue Undercut Girl decides not to rush the job in the short time they have until their train arrives at its destination. Instead she waits out the three minutes, during which she informs him that her name is not Blue Undercut Girl but is instead Natalie, and that her friends names are Nikhil, Jimmy, Andrew (Baby Ben), Charlotte (Curly Red Hair), Maxine (Rainbow Suspenders), and Danny (PICO DE GAYO). She also tells him that the flags painted on her own cheeks are indeed flags, and they’re apparently the colors of the bisexual pride flag, which— fuck, Richie’s so out of touch. He should fucking know these things, he thinks, shouldn’t he?

Before he can worry too much about it, though, the train comes to its screeching halt, and they all disembark together into the stale underground air of beautiful Penn Station.

Eddie pretty much instantly proves that all that talk about _cutting through crowds_ wasn’t just talk. There’s a genuine fucking sea of people swarming the station, people in rainbow shirts and rainbow dresses and rainbow suspenders and rainbow feather boas, people with huge flags draped over their shoulders like capes, people cheering and people shouting and people singing. And Eddie leads them all straight through it like a mother duck and her row of aimless ducklings, right up to a little alcove against the wall.

“Oh, awesome,” Natalie says, waving at Richie and then the concrete floor. “Sit down like, _right_ here.”

He does, gathering up his legs criss-cross applesauce so she has room to kneel in front of him, and he lifts his glasses up to perch on top of his head. A surge of awkwardness runs through him, then, as Natalie busts out the eyeshadow palette and makeup brushes, a surge of awkwardness and nerves that say, _hey, you’re about to have actual makeup on your fucking face,_ and _hey, this is gonna be one step short of wearing a sign over your neck that says you like to suck cock, are you sure you wanna do this,_ but—

Well, it’s happening.

And he does want it. He does.

Luckily, though, when Natalie actually gets to work, the hyper-awareness that he’s a forty-year-old dude and there’s a teenage girl putting her hands on his face, well, that kind of overshadows the standard shame that’s slithering somewhere around his ribs. He stuffs his hands up under his armpits to feel a little less weird about it.

Holy shit, makeup brushes are _soft._

As Natalie works, she asks, “Is this your first time?”

“Getting my makeup professionally done while my ass goes numb in Penn Station? Yeah, actually, if you can believe it.”

A few of her friends laugh at that. Even without his glasses Richie knows that Eddie just smiled and rolled his eyes, and Richie winks in his general direction.

“First time at Pride, too?” Natalie asks, because apparently she won’t let him off the hook when she’s got him held prisoner.

“Uh. Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

“Cool,” Natalie says, because Richie’s quickly learning that that’s her favorite way to respond to pretty much everything. The makeup brush ghosts under his cheekbone, light as a feather. Behind her, her friends are chatting amongst themselves. Maybe. Richie can’t really tell, they’re sort of blurring in with the crowd from where he’s sitting, and it’s tough to parse different voices in the cacophony of the train station. Natalie goes on, “I’ve never, like, seen any of your shows or anything, but I’ve had the new one saved on Netflix for literally like, months, and I just keep forgetting to check it out. Heard it was good, though.”

“Eh, it’s alright,” Richie shrugs one shoulder, careful not to jostle his face too much.

“It kicked ass and you know it,” Eddie speaks up, then scoffs. “It’s _alright,_ he says.”

Richie tries, and fails, not to smile wide enough to fuck up what Natalie’s doing, but luckily it’s at that point that she snaps her eyeshadow palette shut and announces, “Done!”

“Really?”

“Yep,” she says, tucking her makeup brushes and her eyeshadow palette into the tiny purple backpack she’s got with her. She stands up and slings it over her shoulder, and when Richie lowers his glasses back down to their proper place on his nose, the first thing he sees is Eddie holding out a hand to help him up.

Richie takes it, knees cracking as he shakes out his legs, and then he waggles his eyebrows down at Eddie and asks, “Well, how do I look? What’s the verdict?”

“You look very nice,” Eddie indulges him, and then, to Natalie: “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Natalie says, flashing two finger guns at them, and then she’s already rejoining her friends and getting sucked back into the crowd. She calls back, “Have fun at the parade! It was nice meeting you!”

Richie waves as she and her friends disappear into the shifting mass of bodies, and then he shoots a look down at Eddie. “Okay, the kid’s gone, you can be honest. How’s it look?”

“I _was_ being honest, dickhead,” Eddie says, tugging him down by the collar of his undershirt so he can press a kiss to his cheek. The kiss is soft, lingering, and there’s a certain thrill to it happening here, in front of hundreds of people that don’t so much as spare them a second glance. Eddie leaves a hand on the center of Richie’s chest when he pulls away, and he reiterates, “It looks nice.”

“Yeah?” Richie asks, going for a shit-eating grin and probably tipping too far into gooey fondness to pull it off. “You think I’m cute, Eds?”

“You know I do,” Eddie says, thumb sweeping back and forth over the space below his collarbone. “And what did I say, huh? Literally _what_ did I say? Making friends with every goddamn person in your immediate vicinity, it’s fucking ridiculous—”

Richie barks a laugh.

“We hadn’t even gotten off the fucking _train_ yet, Jesus Christ,” Eddie shakes his head, still smiling. He trails his hand down Richie’s arm to grab his hand and tug him along, and Richie can’t do anything but let himself be swept away. “Now come on, let’s go, we gotta figure out where the fuck everyone else is, and that is _not_ gonna be fucking easy.”

Eddie’s right, of course, because he always is.

It is _not_ fucking easy to find the others.

Richie kind of enjoys it, though, and he knows Eddie does, too. If Ben and Bev and Mike and Bill and Stan and Patty are the destination, then Richie is sure as hell loving the journey. They step out onto 7th Ave, squinting against the searing June sunlight and dodging bodies left and right as Eddie ducks and weaves and tugs him to the edge of the crowd, right up against the edge of some towering building of shimmering glass and brick, and they keep on moving as the crowd gets thicker and thicker the closer they get to the site of the actual parade.

And the thing is, Richie’s seen New York before. Of course he has, he’s done a thousand and one shows in various shitty little comedy clubs in his twenties and bigass concert venues in his thirties and, once now, in Radio City Music Hall.

But he’s never quite seen New York like _this._

There’s tons of people milling around, and that’s about par for the course in this part of Manhattan, but they’re all _smiling,_ and that sure as hell is not. Eddie tugs him past a street vendor that’s selling hot dogs and sausages judging by the smell of smoked meat, and another vendor selling art, then another guy about ten yards past that who’s shouting _pride flags here, get your pride flags, three by five for twenty bucks, handheld flags five a piece or three for ten!_ When Richie lifts a hand up and shields his eyes to see through the sun, he can see over most of the heads in the crowd, giving him a perfect view of the guardrail up ahead between the crowd and the street where the parade will supposedly be coming by in an hour or so.

Eddie pauses, gently guiding Richie to press his back against the wall of the closest building so that the rest of the crowd can get around them.

“All good?” Richie asks.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, eyes down on his phone in the hand that’s not resting against Richie’s chest. “Just figuring out where Ben and Bev are.”

“Hey, you wanna hop on my shoulders?” Richie asks him. “You’ll probably be able to see better.”

“Fuck you,” Eddie says without any kind of heat, distracted, not looking up. “You couldn’t lift me for more than a few seconds and we both know it.”

“Eh, if I lift with my legs I think I could pull it off.”

Eddie snorts, not even gracing that one with a rebuttal since they both know it’s bullshit, and Richie gives himself a second or two to appreciate the view, the little furrows in Eddie’s brow and the pull of his cotton shirt across his shoulders and the way the sleeves hug his biceps just right. It’s not all that humid out, but it _is_ humid enough to get his hair to curl a bit at the ends, making him look all soft and fluffy and as touchable as ever. For lack of anything better to do with his hands, Richie reaches up and wraps one around Eddie’s wrist, thumb stroking over the little jutting bone there.

Eddie glances up at him, a shy smile only visible because of the dimples, and then he looks down at his phone again.

“They’re at 5th and 21st.”

“Thank you,” Richie says with a sagely nod. “That means absolutely nothing to me.”

“It— What? Oh my God, you’re hopeless, dude, we’re at 7th and 21st, they’re two blocks away, it’s not that complicated—”

“It’s a _grid system,_ motherfucker,” Richie says, giggling as Eddie tugs him along again.

In the end, they find that Ben and Bev are, in fact, only two blocks away. And as luck would have it, they’re also on the same side of the parade, so Richie doesn’t have to hop the guardrail and sprint across 5th Avenue to get to them — because he _would,_ obviously, and then Eddie would scold him for it while simultaneously following along with him, and it’d be, like, a whole thing.

Bev lets out a happy squeal when she sees them, immediately hopping up onto Richie’s back piggyback style and kissing the side of his head, and Ben gives him a firm hug at the same time so he briefly turns into a Richie sandwich between them.

“Nice rainbows,” Bev says, hopping off of him and hugging Eddie tight around the waist.

“Why thank you. A lovely teenage girl with an extensive eyeshadow collection did it for me,” Richie says, then nods at Ben. “And same to you, sir. Being _betrothed_ to a fashion designer has its perks, I see.”

Ben flushes so goddamn easily it’s insane, and also unfairly adorable. He smiles wide and spins in a circle, showing off the rainbow pin-stripe button up that looks like it was perfectly tailored to his fucking upside-down triangle of a torso, because it probably was. “Thanks,” he says, and then confirms, “Bev made it.”

“You have outdone yourself, Miss Marsh,” Richie tells her, and she smiles and gives as much of a bow as she can, now that the crowd’s starting to press in again.

“So, what do you guys say?” she asks, slinking underneath Ben’s waiting arm and half-hugging his waist like it’s second nature. “Ready to find a spot to watch the parade?”

The rest of the day passes in a sort of sundrenched colorful blur. They make a solid attempt at watching the actual parade once it gets going, but then Mike texts the groupchat to let them all know that he and Bill are at 5th and 14th, so the four of them abandon their _choice_ fucking spot right at the curb and instead weave their way through the crowd to find them.

On the way they find Stan and Patty, somewhere between twentieth and eighteenth. (“It was a sandhill crane,” Stan says in lieu of a greeting when he sees Richie. “Not a bad find for New Jersey this time of year.”) Patty and Bev happily shriek at each other and hug like a pair of long reunited hyperactive college girls, and Richie wastes a solid twenty minutes doing nothing but blowing raspberries into little Baby Uris’s cheeks where she’s strapped into a papoose on Stan’s chest. Then they have to stop again the next block over because a fan recognizes Richie, and then _again_ because a different fan recognizes Bev, and then they stop one more time because Patty and Bev both want to buy roasted peanuts from a street vendor—

And then finally, _finally,_ the gang’s all together again when they find Mike and Bill at fourteenth.

In a stunning turn of events, it turns out Bill got the memo on the different pride flags and what they mean long before Richie ever did, since he’s sporting a pink-blue-and-purple feather boa that Richie can’t help thinking the kid from the train would _fucking_ love. Mike flashes them a wide smile from behind a pair of sunglasses with rainbow stripes along the frames, slinging an arm around each of them in turn before he devotes his full attention to Stan and Patty’s baby, cooing and kissing her head a million and a half times.

In the end, Richie thinks they end up seeing about five to ten percent of the actual parade — of which, though, he is grateful to have seen, since it happened to include the one float Sir Ian McKellen was standing on and thus gave Richie a _perfect_ excuse to speak in his Gandalf Voice for the next hour until Stan threatened to upend a smoothie over his head.

(Worth it.)

The rest of the time is spent with the crowd. Buying souvenirs from street vendors, joining in with every single chant they hear _with_ enthusiasm, stopping and chatting it up with random people on the street, indulging passersby and letting them make funny faces at Stan’s baby. They all get separated a few times, swept away by the crowd and the fervor of the event, but it’s easy enough to wander back and find each other again, especially as the parade itself winds down and the crowded rainbow-confetti-strewn streets begin to thin out. And contrary to what Eddie may have expected, Richie doesn’t make friends with _everyone,_ he isn’t _constantly_ recognized — he’s not, like, A-list or anything — but the number of times he runs into a fan does start to creep up into the double digits by the late afternoon. He’s now signed a couple pride flags, accepted more than a few hugs, and was even offered a hit off a blunt from a _very_ pleasant gender-indeterminate college kid.

It’s… Richie doesn’t know what it _is,_ really, this feeling he gets every time a kid decked out in rainbows from head to toe sees _him,_ Richie fucking Tozier, and gets all starry-eyed over it. Like him coming out on stage wasn’t just a nerve-wracking, puke-inducing, life-changing thing that pissed off all his old fans and brought in a few new ones.

He fucking— like, _means_ something to some of these kids, apparently. _Moved_ them and shit. How fucking wild is that?

That’s what he’s thinking about in the afternoon, anyway, when all the losers have gathered in a swanky little bar and grill joint for an early dinner and he’s ordering drinks from the bar while everyone else debates appetizers at the table. That’s what he’s thinking about. That, and cranes. Cranes coasting over sun-dappled water in North Jersey. Kids talking about cranes. Kids proudly wearing flags on their shirts, their backpacks, their faces, announcing to the word that they’re different and they don’t give a flying fuck what anyone else thinks about it. Kids talking about a crane who plucks out her feathers every night, _and she’s exhausted, right, but she’s happy, ‘cause like, she can keep pretending. And that’s what it’s like._

Is that the point, he thinks? Is that what those kids were talking about? Are they — all of them, Richie and all those kids and everyone waltzing around New York City today with all their glitter and their rainbows and their pride flags bright on their cheeks like streaks of war paint — are they all just cranes that have finally let their feathers grow back in and stay intact?

“Excuse me,” someone says, yanking him out of what’s _gotta_ be a thousand yard stare, and Richie shakes his head, looking up.

The woman leaning into the bar next to him can’t be more than a few years younger than Richie is, assuming she’s not older. She could be a very healthy fifty, for all Richie can tell, with her salt-and-pepper shoulder length hair and her suntanned olive skin the way her tentative smile drives some crinkles into the corners of her eyes. Richie glances over his shoulder in case she was talking to someone else, finds no one, and looks back.

“Uh… Yeah?”

“Are you Richard Tozier?”

 _“Hoo_ man, Richard,” he laughs, shaking his head. “Haven’t heard that one in a while. It’s Richie. Please. Only my tax guy calls me Richard.”

On Richie’s other side, startling the _shit_ out of him, Stanley sidles up to the bar without so much as a breath of warning and says, “When have I ever in my life called you ‘Richard?’”

“Je- _sus,”_ Richie says, turning to shoot him a glare. “Weren’t you at the table? I thought you guys were ordering appetizers.”

Stan shrugs, grabs a toothpick out of the little dispenser on the bartop, and then leans entirely across the bar to reach toward the little container of olives that the bartenders use for martinis. He starts stabbing them with the toothpick, picking them up one by one and piling them onto a napkin, and says by way of explanation, “Patty wanted more olives.”

Without another word he straightens back up, pats Richie on the back with his free hand, and heads back to the table with his new stash.

“… Uh. Anyway,” Richie says, shaking his head and returning to facing the bar. “Richie. Please.”

“Sandra,” the woman answers, a bemused smile on her face. “Listen, are you, um… Are you gonna be here for a minute? I really don’t want to keep you, but my girlfriend’s meeting me here, and she will just… God, she’ll lose her mind if she sees you here. She’s a huge fan.”

“A huge fan, huh?” Richie asks. He’s run into a good number of fans today, but none of them would probably have been classified as _huge fans._ Mostly people who just… knew who he was, people who liked his show, people who gassed him up a little bit since they were seeing him in person.

“Huge fan,” Sandra reiterates, nodding. “Seriously.”

Richie flags down the bartender, then, quickly ordering a jack and coke for himself and gin and tonic for Eddie, and he says to Sandra, “Well, fuck it, I’m not really going anywhere.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Richie shrugs, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder. “I’m with all those losers at Table 3. You know how hard it is to wrap up a dinner for eight, _plus_ a baby? I’m gonna be here all night.”

“I mean, if you’re sure—”

“I’m sure, c’mon, don’t worry about it,” Richie tells her, waving her down. “Seriously. Actually, I think you’re vastly overestimating how often I run into ‘huge fans.’ To answer the question that you did not ask: It is _not_ often. So forgive me if I’m gonna take a minute or two to, like, bask and shit.”

Sandra doesn’t quite laugh at that, but she smiles wide, showing off a dimple in one cheek. “Yeah?”

“Uh, _yeah._ I’m not A-list, B-list, _or_ C-list,” Richie tells her, giving the bartender a grateful smile when he slides Richie’s two drinks over to him. He hands him his card, tells him to keep a tab open. “For real. My one guest appearance on Billy on the Street gets way more attention than my actual comedy shows. And like, it’s not even close.”

“Okay, well, to her, you’re pretty great,” Sandra says, still smiling. “Your show meant a lot to her. She only just— oh! Actually, there she is. She can tell you. Rosie!”

Sandra puts her back to the bar, waving her girlfriend over, and there’s the rapidfire click of heels on hardwood before Richie’s peripheral vision is filled with Sandra drawing her girlfriend in for a kiss. It’s the kind of kiss Richie recognizes even while awkwardly not looking right at them, eyes down on his drink, rolling his glass on the bartop. It’s the I’m-so-glad-you’re-back kind of kiss that Eddie sometimes gifts him with when he finally gets home from a weeks-long talk show tour. The firm press of faces, a little desperate, somehow still gentle.

“Hey,” Sandra’s girlfriend says, in a soft low voice. “Did you— _oh, my God.”_

There are three things Richie notices about Sandra’s girlfriend, in order: One, she’s pretty damn good looking, maybe upper forties or lower fifties, with a sharp chin and auburn hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun, soft brown eyes framed by impossibly long dark lashes. Two, she’s got both a silk scarf around her shoulders in the colors of baby blue and pink and white — which Richie now knows are the colors of the trans flag, thank you very much, he’s _learning_ things today — and a fist-sized pin on her shirt that proudly says PROTECT TRANS KIDS in simple white on black.

And three, Sandra was not fucking exaggerating. Her girlfriend takes one look at Richie, says _oh my God,_ panics, and spins away to put her back to him.

“Hi,” Richie says, cracking a smile because he is still _so_ not accustomed to fans that are actually, like… excited to see him.

“Rose?” Sandra asks. “Honey?”

Rose slowly spins back around, having apparently composed herself enough to face him, though there’s a flush of pink across her cheeks and nose.

“You’re Richie Tozier,” she says, completely monotone.

“Either that or the DMV gave me the wrong license,” Richie says, and it’s such a stupid joke, but it gets her to giggle at least. “What’s up? Rose? Right?”

He reaches out to shake her hand, and she immediately responds, shaking his with both of hers. Her voice tumbles out on one breath when she says, “I _loved_ your show. So much. It was— It was so incredible to see you doing that, and— and _on stage,_ no less, in front of so many people—”

“Ah, c’mon,” Richie says on reflex, shrugging. “Go big or go home, right?”

She laughs, but her smile’s a bit wobbly. “Fucking _apparently.”_

“Yeah, see? You get it,” Richie says, laughing with her. “Seriously. For real, I’m a lot of things, but an attention-hogging ham is at like, the fuckin’ _top_ of the list. I had to do it in the most dramatic way possible or it was never actually gonna—” he gestures with his finger, up his throat and then a splayed open hand at the top like he’s miming throwing up— “fucking come out of me, you know? And it needed to come out of me at that point. It did. I was gonna fuckin’ explode if it didn’t.”

Rose nods, a little shaky with it, a little frantic, and then—

“Oh, _woah,_ woah, woah,” Richie sputters, immediately panicking, and he goes for a reassuring smile that probably just looks fucking manic. “Hey, no, no, you can’t cry, that’s not fair, ‘cause then I’m gonna cry, and no one wants to see that, I won’t be _nearly_ as graceful about it—”

“I’m sorry,” Rose sniffs, gathering herself, fanning her face with one hand and wiping under her eyes with the other. “I’m sorry, I just…” she takes a slow, trembling inhale, and she smiles again, eyes shining. “I just— what you said? It was gonna explode out of you if you didn’t— You’re right! You’re right, and that’s the thing, because I… I sort of, I came out? Because of that show?”

… Oh.

_Oh._

Holy shit.

She couldn’t have more effectively knocked the wind out of him if she took a metal baseball bat to his chest. His shoulders sag. His mouth falls open.

“What? You— _Really?”_

“Really!”

“Because of _me?”_

“Because of you,” she says, and she’s crying again and swiping at her cheeks but she’s smiling, wobbly and bright and happy. “I just— I thought— I mean you’re not even as old as I am, but I saw you do that, and—”

“Holy shit—”

“— and I thought, you know, ‘Hey, if it wasn’t too late for him, maybe it’s not too late for me, either—”

“Holy _shit,”_ Richie says again, because yeah, holy shit, he is definitely going to make good on his threat to ugly cry in front of her. He raises both hands to cover his mouth like she won’t be able to see the tears in his eyes, and he asks, “I, uh— Can I—?”

She nods before he’s even finished the question, reaching out for him as he hops off the barstool and pulls her into a hug. She’s nearly as tall as he is, or taller, maybe, but that’s probably just because of the heels, and she wraps her arms tight around his neck and lets him bury his face in her shoulder.

“Holy shit,” Richie croaks, because apparently that’s all his vocabulary’s been reduced to. “I— Thanks.”

That makes her shake with a wet, teary laugh. “What are you thanking _me_ for?”

“I don’t know!” Richie practically yells, but he’s laughing and crying, too, so fuck it. He’s lost all control of the volume of his voice. He takes a breath, running his hand up and down her back. “For… For telling me, I guess? Is it super fucking lame and cliché and shit if I say thanks for, like, _being you_ or whatever?”

“No, come on,” she says. “It’s Pride, you’re allowed to be super lame and cliché and shit, I think.”

“Oh, that’s a fucking relief,” Richie sighs.

They stay that way for a few seconds longer, just sort of holding on to each other, swaying a little. When they finally do pry themselves apart, Richie covers his face with one hand and flails around the bar for the napkin dispenser with the other.

“No, God, don’t fucking look at me, see what I mean? You’re like, a goddamn _movie star crier,_ meanwhile I’m probably over here looking like Joe Pesci lost a fight with a hornets’ nest, Jesus Christ—”

She laughs again, taking the napkin he offers her to wipe at the corners of her eyes, and Richie, for his part, blows his nose like a trumpet into a whole fucking stack of ‘em.

When he gets done piling all their gross napkins into a cup to make it easier for the bartender to throw them out without touching them, he looks up to find that it’s no longer just him and Rose and Sandra at the bar. Sometime between Richie burying his face in Rose’s shoulder and now, Eddie’s actually gotten up from their table and wandered over here, already making quiet conversation with Sandra.

“Eds! You—!”

“Inside voice, Rich, holy shit,” Eddie softly interrupts, shooting him a look that’s maybe one percent scolding, ninety-nine percent fond. He’s biting his bottom lip again as if the dimples aren’t a dead giveaway that he’s smiling, and he gives Richie a subtle once-over, a soft raise of an eyebrow that asks the question _are you okay_ without having to ask.

 _Never better,_ Richie thinks, plastering on a wide smile and waving at Rose. “Eddie, this is Rose. Rose, Eddie.”

“Nice flag,” Rose says, and Eddie indulgently lifts up the massive rainbow flag he bought a few hours ago, which is now hanging from his neck like a cape. He even gives Rose a little bow, which is. _Fucking_ adorable.

Richie slaps the bartop. “Drinks! Ladies, let me buy you a drink.”

“Oh, we can’t—”

“You sure as hell can! Do you have any idea how much money they pay you to do a Netflix comedy special?” Richie asks, and he pauses for a beat. “Not _fucking_ enough, that’s how much! Luckily my boyfriend here makes enough for the both of us, so we’re not hurting. Eds! Eduardo!”

“Those are both sort of my name, yes,” Eddie answers, slinking over to press himself against Richie’s side. His gin and tonic is probably still good, Richie thinks, if a little diluted with melted ice. “And yeah, come on.” He gestures with a tilt of his head toward the bar. “My treat. We’ll, like… do a toast, or something.”

“Pride toast!” Richie whoops, looping an arm around Eddie’s shoulders and planting a gross, sloppy kiss on his temple. “Happy Pride, ladies! Woo!”

By the time everyone finishes their drinks, and Eddie and Richie bid their goodbyes to Sandra and Rose and return to the table, and the losers wrap up their utterly and completely chaotic eight-person dinner—

The sun is _somehow_ still out. It’s been _hours,_ and even if the shadows are getting long and the rainbow confetti and stray feathers are slowly but surely being swept away by street cleaners, the sun is still out.

God, Richie fucking loves summer.

By now the losers have all trickled back to wherever they came from, Bev and Ben to their hotel room in Upper Manhattan, Bill and Mike to JFK for a red-eye flight back to California, Patty and Stan and the baby off toward Brooklyn to pay a visit to Patty’s parents. They’re all more-or-less scattering across the country again, and Richie knows he’s gonna miss them soon, but for now he’s still riding high on the buzz from seeing them all in one place, from adventuring through the big city together and having dinner together and arguing over who can fit the most mozzarella sticks in their mouth at once together.

Now he and Eddie are on their way back toward Penn Station for a train ride back to their hotel in Newark and an early morning flight back home tomorrow, and his arms are sunburnt to shit, of course, and his feet and ankles and knees are pointedly reminding him with every throb of his pulse that a forty-year-old body isn’t quite meant for a full day of city walking. But he’s feeling pleasantly sunbaked and sleepy and just… _warm,_ though whether that’s from the inside out or the outside in, he’s not really sure.

Eddie’s freckles are out in full display today, though, so. At least some of that warmth’s coming from inside.

“Hey,” Richie nudges him with his hip. “You awake over there?”

“Mm-hmm,” Eddie nods with a little sun-drunk smile that shoots at something in the center of Richie’s chest. He looks every bit as happy and sleepy as Richie’s feeling. He’s got that new three-by-five rainbow flag wrapped around his shoulders like a shawl, and now he lifts the corner closest to Richie and throws it over him, too, so it’s covering both of them and he can wrap an arm snug around Richie’s waist. “Long day, huh?”

Richie hums in the affirmative, looping his arm over Eddie’s shoulders.

“It’s just… weird, you know?” Eddie says, his voice low and a little hoarse from all the cheering and shouting they’ve both been doing all day. When Richie looks down at him, he just sees Eddie staring thoughtfully into space, walking them through the New York City streets without missing a step, without having to spare a thought for _where_ and _how._ His mind is elsewhere. “It is, it’s weird. Being able to be… You know, fuck, to just _be,_ I guess. Without… worrying about it.”

“Mm,” Richie agrees.

“Like, forget fucking being _proud of it,_ I’d have been happy with just… the neutral,” Eddie goes on, shrugging. “You know? Not— I don’t mean being _terrified_ of it, I don’t think I was ever terrified of it—”

Richie snorts. “That makes one of us.”

Eddie tips his head, knocking it into Richie’s shoulder and giving his waist a sympathetic squeeze. Because he knows. Of course he knows. “I mean, like… I don’t know, fuck. Flinching away from it, I guess? I’d have been happy just _not_ thinking it was some… off… wrong… _thing,_ I’d have been happy with being neutral about it, and now we spent all day fucking screaming it, and we’re walking around Manhattan with a rainbow flag wrapped around both of us, and everyone’s cheering us on and everyone’s just fucking _happy,_ and it’s…”

Richie dips his head down and kisses the top of Eddie’s, and he finishes for him, “Weird.”

“Good weird, though,” Eddie adds, giving him another squeeze. “Really fucking good, just. Unfamiliar.”

Richie’s still got the lower half of his face pressed into Eddie’s hair, and he squints, thinking, internally debating whether it’ll be worth it to voice his next thought aloud. In the end, though, he’s got the impulse control of a toddler, so he asks:

“Regular scary?”

There’s a beat in which Eddie goes dead silent, and then he starts shaking, doubling over with his arm still looped around Richie’s waist. It tugs Richie down, too, both of them walking in a weird bent-over cross between a frogmarch and two drunk guys in a three-legged race, before Eddie straightens up and shoves him in the side, still laughing. “You’re so goddamn dumb, I swear to fucking God— _fine,_ yeah, it’s regular scary. Jesus fucking Christ. I can’t stand you, dude.”

Richie shrugs. “Yeah, you can.”

Eddie, with the hand that’s holding his corner of the pride flag, grabs Richie’s hand and presses a kiss to his palm. “Yeah,” he agrees, still shaking with the last dregs of a laugh, turning Richie’s hand over and kissing the knuckles, too. “Yeah, I sure the fuck can.”

**Author's Note:**

> it is worth noting that i had been drafting “eddie and richie go to their first pride” fic for about a week, then i saw [this amazing artwork](https://twitter.com/clownmoviehell/status/1268937656953704448?s=20) and said, “shit, okay, OBVIOUSLY all the losers have to be there” so everyone thank twitter user @clownmoviehell for me making that overhaul to this little oneshot because it was definitely a vast improvement (and also just. look at it. look at it and tell me that artwork doesn’t fill your whole heart)
> 
> title is from a hozier song, because of course it is. specifically, it's from To Noise Making (Sing)
> 
> [here](https://poshmark.com/listing/Rainbow-trim-cotton-shorts-5e483f17969d1f087ad03248?l_con=PREOWNED%2FUSED&utm_source=gdm&utm_campaign=1840610133&campaign_id=1840610133&ad_partner=google&gskid=pla-676189098686&gcid=345791431433&ggid=69377120613&gdid=c&g_network=g&enable_guest_buy_flow=true&gclid=CjwKCAjw8df2BRA3EiwAvfZWaLeW3MeAWR_kRMssRwMFrK3NMur-K8qzs2cYXfZpu_X7oTjWPEEu-BoC0Z0QAvD_BwE) are the shorts eddie was wearing, [here](https://www.newchic.com/short-sleeve-shirts-9149/p-1535736.html?utm_source=googleshopping&utm_medium=cpc2&utm_content=muna6&currency=USD&createTmp=1&ID=5162186246781&utm_source=googleshopping&utm_medium=shopping&utm_campaign=pla-white-ssc2-us&utm_content=muna5&gclid=CjwKCAjw2uf2BRBpEiwA31VZj6qfxsAHU-vLTXrbO-cmsLjcZQG8YcP9xkUbjbnBqukovghrCYUw-BoClucQAvD_BwE) is richie’s shirt, and [here](https://www.lookhuman.com/design/90475-pico-de-gayo/3600-white-md?gclid=Cj0KCQjwoPL2BRDxARIsAEMm9y9e7MAKtOmob5M-cfeHCwxWAaMg-XtSa8iCd_2JBVOoO_e3FYf3YmoaAlgxEALw_wcB) is the PICO DE GAYO shirt that the kid on the train was wearing
> 
> happy pride! please donate to your local black lives matter group! keep signing petitions and supporting protests!


End file.
